


Sanctuary Dark

by furrywing



Category: District 9 (2009)
Genre: Alien Mythology/Religion, Alternate Universe, Angst, Fluff, Gen, Short Stories
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:00:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22675993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/furrywing/pseuds/furrywing
Summary: Various one shots and art connected to All the Waves in Her Atmosphere that focus on the main cast and poleepkwa background characters or other aspects of the world of my AU. Kind of behind-the-scenes of stuff that wouldn't fit in with the main narrative and little bits of world building. (This isn't new, I changed the title to be more fitting r i p.)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6





	1. Chapter Index

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea what's going to be in this, but like Atmosphere, same content warnings for the film! Human (and nonhuman) rights violations, medical torture, trauma, loss of bodily autonomy, dysphoria, and xenophobia. At some point the archive warnings might apply: I'll specify if they do in each chapter's summary/ beginning notes!
> 
> I'll also add tags as they become relevant but I'm still learning about the whole tagging thing aka what certain tags and tropes mean.
> 
> Mostly... I can't resist expanding on my AU! And expanding on some of the unseen events taking place during the film to character build bc be damned if I have the patience to wait on Christopher! There's just way too much! And it helps me to practice writing and art (this is all very casual nonsense). ^^;;;

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Small edits! Added this and changed the title to be more appropriate in the anticipation of posting another short story.

**The Old People**

Christopher's daughter reflects on her survival and the fate of her culture.

**The World The Same As She Was Back Then**

As they travel towards the home world, Christopher wonders where the future will take them and if they'll survive to see it through. First person POV.


	2. The Old People

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note, Sherry is semi-canon. She was referenced in Christopher's blog, as his missing daughter, on a promotional website that operated just before and a little while after the film release. She's referenced in a lot of fanon, but I realized newer fans unaware of CJ's blog might be lost on who she is. CJ's blog is also the source of Oliver's name iirc.

_All my life I've been a star, holding a light up in the dark, while I try to keep clear of all the waves in your atmosphere._

***

Sherry still listened to the stories of the Old People. Always they brought warmth into her soul, never faltering. The rise and fall of continents. The spirits of plains animals. The adventures of warriors far greater and far more mighty than anything here. How the six moons once tried to overwhelm the seventh and the night the seventh moon gave up its place as the centre of the world, became a satellite of its brethren without animosity.

Each of them etched their way in and chased off the darkness of Sherry’s thoughts, made her feel secure in her ever changing identity. Though Sherry was not her name, it was the one her Ama had secured when he acquired a rare license for her birth. Sometimes, thinking back, it reminded her of him. He’d chosen it because to humans it meant many things all at once, the way Oliver had meant many things at once. It was even an easy sound to make, just a hissing of breath. Now that time was behind her, when she had become one of the people with no name, a surviving ghost of District 9, and her Ama was very far away and farther every moment. She hoped. Glancing over her shoulder at the other children gathered around, she smiled, her eyes wrinkled.

Because it was a name carrying many meanings, she’d come to call herself one of them. Fawn. And walked forward. That was all there was to do. Build the future. Shake away the isolated past, the scared solitude, the escape which had been so easy, so fortunate, so graced by luck that she could hardly believe it. When in a violent blink an exosuit had rammed and massacred the casspir without decapitating or crushing her tiny body even while it unknowingly tore apart the younger kid beside her and dumped them into her lap. So many voices, pulling her out, so many shots she couldn’t place at the time.

And she had disappeared then. That hot afternoon, Sherry became a ghost.

Wringing a tattered grey cloth into a thin spiral, water beading and falling into the bowl, Sherry carried it around the small sunken hearth and passed it to the Old One. They nodded in acknowledgment before pressing it to their red eyes, blinking away smoke that barely lifted through a smoke hole in the tent’s roof, which for tonight was the only source of winter heat. But the pollution didn’t dissuade them or the seven children they were supervising, all wide-eyed and jittery and longing for memories.

Seven was an honoured number and she suspected it shaped the elder’s choice tonight. They were years apart, nigh over a hundred and fifty by the measure of Earth. And that was a great fortune for the people of the this decaying city. They hunched forward like a bear, almost doubled over when they walked, would hold tight to the cane beside them. And Sherry would help without being asked, yet would know when to back off without instruction.

There was a rasping, gravelly tone to their voice. Sometimes she thought it sounded uncomfortable. But the Old One had lived her life and her hardship a dozen times over before ever falling into the waves of this new atmosphere.

“We were brought into the world on that first moon, a spirit we named like what was named here. Terra. They were small and quiet, and so they gave us a soft voice to remember them by. But Terra was infinite and immoveable, and so they gave us our carapace, setting us apart from all but the most intelligent species of our kind. And among those seven moons, rising and falling together, we were to come together as well, as one people, and one soul-”

Hmm, an origin myth. Not the most interesting anymore. Not her favourite, not the one her Ama reminisced on. Stardust that rained down on Terra like light. That touched the spirits of Terra, turned them into something other, something apart. Turned them into poleepkwa.

It was nonsense, but she loved it.

But more she loved to hear about history, about what they’d built and lost. What it was to soar through the very heart of emptiness, of the universe between here and there.  
She dropped onto the mat beside one of the children, pulling them into her lap. A tiny, hopeless twig who'd be dreaming of an unknown home that Fawn no longer felt drawn to. A place she’d lost the heart to return to.

She’d set up the battered laptop tomorrow, tether it to her clunky, stolen phone before the owner could deactivate. There was a legacy her soul longed to bring into the future. Maybe stardust would be it. Maybe the ghosts who’d lost their names, who’d become like spirits. Small steps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ofc Terra wouldn’t be the same word. ^^; It would be their own word translated. For earth, for ground, for soil, for physicality, for, well, terra. I feel like across species there’s universality. I don’t know why I feel this. Like we are all connected.
> 
> Like in Atmosphere, all my names are just translated versions of their poleepkwa names because I have no idea how to transcribe kdhfdgurgledhdfggpopsefhdfclick into English. XD
> 
> If you enjoyed this kind of madness, lemme know! And if anyone ever has a question about this world I’ll take a shot at writing it! <3 ya’ll. Thank you for your feedback on Atmosphere too which has been so inspiring I think I’ve melted into the Earth.
> 
> The song lyric at the beginning is Atmosphere by Kaskade. And yes, it is the inspiration for the title.


	3. The World the Same As She Was Back Then

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As they travel towards the home world, Christopher wonders where the future will take them and if they'll survive to see it through.

Reality settled in on me four days in. Four Earth days. When my head began to clear and everything that ached and burned dulled just enough that I could walk about the ship with the help of a metal bar that Oliver had found for me.

We lost track soon after, the planet and its sun less than marbles in the horizon.

And with that greater clarity, as my stomach grumbled and lurched, I knew the cold horror of space.

We would starve, alone and in silence, in an apathetic universe. That terror had me roaming the ship for hours, me hobbling with my makeshift walking stick and Oliver running curiously ahead, brushing his fingers across everything he could touch as we covered several kilometres of laneways, exploring in circles to and from the drop ship.

Almost everywhere there was evidence of a human presence. Drill holes here and there where doors refused to open for researchers, orange tents and abandoned camp stoves. The ship’s systems had automatically closed to us any bays that had external damage so that the interior continued to be a protective bubble ferrying us home and shielding us from the violence of every star we crossed paths with.

I suppose I couldn’t blame them for too much of the damage or the scavenging. I imagined I would have entertained the same curiosity and harvested the ship to learn more. Still, it was irritating in the context of my present situation.

Oliver made a game of stacking discarded tin cans and soda bottles into pyramids whenever I paused to search the campsites from anything that remained. Soon enough we found a pattern to MNU’s explorations, and with fortune of my side (and plenty of experience with scavenging) gathered several weeks worth of food. It provided enough of a buffer to ease some of my anxiety but I couldn’t escape dreaming of those who might find us if we drifted beyond the Sky Roads, perhaps millennia away, less than skeletons. If my family might ever know. If there might be someone else out there. If the humans might one day reach beyond their own solar system, the only home they ever knew.

Every minute of exploration captured Oliver’s imagination, though for a long time we avoided those places that an adolescent me recalled, because though the memory was weak I feared to face my past too quickly.

Our adventure brought some victories with the grief. The water reservoir and sewage system were intact. Most electrical systems functioned, though I was apprehensive about powering up lights unneccessarily and kept them off to conserve as much fuel as possible.

When we at last came to the great halls that we’d occupied during that time the doors remained closed, trapped by Earth's gravity, knowing bitterly and apprehensively something lived below, something no poleepkwa had thought to ever find in our millennia of space travel, all the memories I feared were nothing more than ghosts in a dark cavern, lit by the crude burning torch we carried and the flashlights left by humans.

The vile odor had faded, the refuse that stained the tiled floor dried to mere dust, the barrel fires nothing but ashes, the skeletons long since removed. It felt as if it hadn’t happened to me, but to someone distant. No more than a story I’d been told long ago. A place filled by such sadness, that with relief I understood Oliver hadn’t picked up on.

We moved on quickly though, crossing the hall in a mere half hour, leaving nothing but our footprints and my old memory behind.

Now Oliver sat beside me, shoveling the last dregs of cream corn under his tentacles with a spoon. While I leaned my head on one of the few surviving trees, earth under my hands, and I stared up into the artificial sky, and then into the skylights nested within. It was the very top floor of the city itself. And those skylights were the only thing keeping this stunted, mostly defoliated tree alive. Here and there, great pools of standing water and still streams were the only things feeding what vegetation clung onto life, pulling constantly from a water reservoir as large as a lake. 

And I thanked Terra the humans had yet to drill into the park land. This one preserved place. 

For that was the beauty of poleepkwa creation.

I had seen the wonder of my home world. Been born under its skies. But many of the other Old People had spent their entire lives within these drifting cities. And cities they were, with everything a city required to thrive and more importantly with everything a person needed to emotionally flourish.

The day we opened the door to the park, was the day I finally turned the ship’s lights on again, to this one level, and to the chambers we had reclaimed as bedrooms to chase away the dark.

But I had bigger worries than festering over the past when our present situation loomed ever closer. We needed to survive a year and a half in this rotting city of metal, some of it gutted, some of it decaying, and some preserved.

Perhaps I always knew that evacuating everyone once the ship was fixed was insane. That this was a journey I had to make alone.

“We’re passing another solar system soon, Ama,” Oliver said, stirring me from my daze. He pushed the tablet into my hands, the portable device we used to monitor our progress when I was away from the bridge.

Sitting up, I flicked through the records.

Life.

We had stopped here before. Our crew of a million had been the first to document the planet, given only a number to its name.

But it was not just any life that thrived below.

And so we were, at last, granted a reprieve, racing back to the controls, smiling at last, joy filling us to the brim. Leaning my walking stick against a chair, I switched on the viewing screen just as we drifted from the Sky Roads, a blue and green pebble growing brighter every moment before we faced its very atmosphere. 

It was a strange one too, cold and scorched save for one patch of life. I'd always been fascinated by these sorts of planets, where their cycle was such that only a small, median strip of land was habitable between two savage and lifeless hemispheres.

The fear returned then. What if the little shuttles broke down on our expedition? What if we were trapped on the surface of another alien nightmare?

Starvation was no kinder an end though.

“I come?” Oliver asked, and I nodded. I couldn’t be alone. And if something happened to me, what then to him?

But while life is filled with unexpected sorrow as much as it is blessed by moments of love and luck, today it was filled with unexpected heartbreak.

The moment we escaped the torrent of energy that beared the ship ever onward, while I flicked through maps that superimposed themselves on the planet spinning before us, text interrupted the view.

A message! Someone out there. Someone other than us!

Someone who _was_ us.

I nearly sobbed. How close were they? If we could bring help early… go back sooner…

Oliver opened the message before my befuddled mind cleared.

_Ama…_

Slammed with sudden disappointment, I stared at the large blue text, confused, believing it to be an old transmission, from a long ago time. Just a glitch in a computer system I was slowly becoming familiar with. But it continued.

And the time it gave was not our own peoples’.

_It is 31/10/2010._

I bolted up, every little bristle of fur raised, antennae frozen as Oliver rushed back to the screen.

_We have moved south towards the ocean._

_We are alive._

_I am alive._

_Come home, Ama._

Come home. The words pierced me in a way I couldn’t understand. I _was_ going home, with my little one at my side, far from a place I might never be able to bring myself to return to.

Oliver’s eyes shone, as he looked between me and the strip of green land pockmarked by hundreds of blue lakes, bound between two violent and hostile worlds. Where I must soon go.

He pulled his little hands from the wall, and turned, haloed by blue light.

My face was tight, jaw grinding.

“Sister,” he said, smiling.

_All my love, little sibling. Compassion is the path that carries us._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A follow up to The Old People.  
> I hope I did CJ some justice. Can’t describe how impatient I am to write him in Atmosphere.
> 
> (I chose Ama as the word for 'parent', because to me the sound is pretty neutral and basic.)


End file.
